


another city (better than this one)

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Bespin, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Gen, Past Lando Calrissian/Han Solo, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13757595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: The kid is sitting cross-legged on a drum of tibanna gas, picking at a hole in his leggings despite the bulky stun-cuffs binding his wrists together. He keeps darting black looks at the patrolmen flanking him on either side, and scowling.“You really should be more creative with your aliases,” Lando says mildly. “I’ve had every anagram of ‘Skywalker’ flagged since the first time you tried to run away from home.”





	another city (better than this one)

* * *

_You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,_  
_find another city better than this one._  
_Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong."_

 

C.P. CAVAFY 

* * *

 

 

“It’s ‘Solo’ now.”

Ben offers it up before Lando can even open his mouth; abrupt and with a whole mess of badly-hidden nerves. For the moment, the kid is sitting cross-legged on a drum of tibanna gas, picking at a hole in his leggings despite the bulky stun-cuffs binding his wrists together. He keeps darting black looks at the patrolmen flanking him on either side, and scowling. He’s fifteen, Lando guesses; give or take a few years (Lando hasn’t been keeping track) and has mastered the art of scowling with his whole body, every inch of him lending itself to the effort.

He’s grown another foot since Lando saw him last; it adds up to a lot of scowling.

“You really should be more creative with your aliases,” Lando says mildly. “I’ve had every anagram of ‘Skywalker’ flagged since the first time you tried to run away from home.”

“Yeah, well, the droid was recording the manifest,” Ben mutters. “Can’t mind-trick a droid into letting you slip by.” 

He shrugs, though it looks more like an awkward twitch. The kid’s all awkwardness, from the absurd slope of his mouth to the way he hunches his shoulders in, like he’s somehow attempting to make himself smaller. The effect is like a bantha trying to pass for a housecat.

Lando snorts. “My advice is the same, pick smarter aliases. Something random, next time.”

Ben shoots him a look and Lando sighs, gesturing for the patrolmen to remove the stun-cuffs. “Why ‘Solo’ all of a sudden?” Lando asks. “You and Leia fighting again?”

Ben hunches over further, the ragged mop of his hair hiding his eyes. It must have been bad, whatever argument he and Leia got into; Ben only cuts his hair when it’s bad. 

Most of Lando’s memories if Ben feature a kid wearing complicated braids—it was an Alderaanian tradition, and it had been a point of pride for Leia to pass on something to her son, Lando knew. He also knew that before being shipped off to Luke, Ben had screamed and screamed and when that didn’t work, he took a pair of scissors and sheared off every strand of hair long enough to braid. Leia had been devastated, and since then, the length of Ben’s hair has become a reliable indicator of how long it’s been since the last serious fight with his mother. 

Lando wonders if it’ll ever be long enough to braid again.

Ben is silent, even when the patrolmen move take off the cuffs. (He clenches his fists when they move in close, and Lando panics, dizzily thinking,  _if he tries anything—_

Ben abruptly flattens his hands out again, as though he can hear Lando thinking it. No one ends up choking on air, or thrown off the dock by a vast, invisible strength; it’s enough and Lando forces himself to relax, breathe.)

“I can handle things from here, thank you,” Lando says to the patrolmen after the cuffs have been removed. He dismisses them with a weary smile, making a private note to follow up after and ensure the paperwork for this particular incident disappears into the ether. 

It’s not the first time Ben decided stow himself away on a ship headed for Cloud City, but it had been easier when he was younger. Leia could call in favors to keep transport grounded, and Han could follow the trail, catch Ben before he got off-world. Captains were suspicious of a child trying to talk his way onto a freighter. The kid only managed to get off Chandrila once before, and then only because he’d snuck in through the exhaust and wedged himself beneath an empty tibanna tank, unnoticed until the freighter was already in hyperspace.

Now that Ben’s come into his inheritance as a Jedi, Lando doubts anyone but Luke could stop him from going wherever he pleases. And clearly, Luke’s falling down on the job.

Lando studies the sullen line of Ben’s mouth. “Does Luke even know you’re here?” he asks.

Ben has gone back to picking at the hole in his leggings. “No,” he says finally. “He probably hasn’t even noticed I’m gone. The— _school_  keeps him busy.”

Lando’s never heard anyone say ‘school’ with as much venom as Ben manages to fit into that single word.

Briefly Lando shuts his eyes, imagining the evening he had planned—the nice decanter of Kuat sherry, minimal paperwork, the sweet possibility that the mine’s handsome new investor would stop by, as he’d suggested he might. It had been a beautiful dream, Lando had been looking forward to realizing it.

Lando sighs, and scrubs a hand over his face.

“Okay, kid. Okay. Here’s the plan. First, we’re going to comm Luke and let him know that you’re not dead. Then you can fill out the application for a temporary residency permit, so you can actually stay in the City longer than a standard day. After that’s finished, I’m having someone fix your hair, because people are going to think you’re some sort of spice-addled vagrant if you walk around like that.”

Ben doesn’t actually  _smile_ , but the hard line of his scowl softens a little. “Okay,” he says.

He signs the temporary residency permit ‘ _Ben Solo_ ’. Lando decides not to mention how uncertainly he scrawls that name, like it belongs to someone else.

 

* * *

 

Lando comms Leia himself, after making sure that Ben is asleep in the guest room. “Hey, Princess,” he says, propping his chin up on his hand, and he has the distinct pleasure of watching her smile.

It’s a strange sort of friendship, between him and the wife of a man he once thought was his; but a friendship, nonetheless. “ _Baron_ ,” Leia laughs, revealing new lines on her face. (Not a very close friendship, or a reliable one. But they both have loved Han Solo, and that sort of ruin demands companionship—and worse, understanding.)

“Your son is here,” Lando says, and the laughter vanishes from her face like a fried lamp, electricity shorting out.

“Oh,” she says weakly.

“I thought I’d tell you. I made him comm Luke, but...”

Leia shuts her eyes, shaking her head heavily. “We fought. Again.”

“I figured.”

Leia sighs, and Lando can hear the strain in her voice. “Thank you for letting me know. I’ll pass it along to Han, he has a new frequency now. I’m sure...we can arrange for transport back to Endor, or reimburse you, I just—”

“That’s not why I’m comming, Leia, don’t worry about—”

“I  _know_ ,” she bites out, and Lando is sorry for bring it up, for saying it like that, like his holdson is some sort of shipment he’s expecting reimbursement for. There’s a gods-fucking  _lake_ of things they don’t talk about when it comes to the wake of the Civil War—the  _Rebellion_ , though no one calls it that any longer. In those early days of peace, Lando had been the only one with money, squirreled away in Hutt vaults and shady Outer Rim banks. He’d funded Leia’s first senatorial campaign, and shelled out for Han’s racing modifications to the  _Falcon_ ; he’d even underwritten Luke’s school on Endor, and that was just a few years ago.

He’d seen it all as...a gift, to the only family he suspected he’d get in this life. It wasn’t as though his money was doing anything meaningful sitting in a bank.

It wasn’t until Han got spectacularly drunk one evening that he let slip Leia uncomfortably considered it a debt, one she could never repay. ( _She’s royal, you know,_  Han had said. He’d been drunk and loose, flushed with love and new fatherhood, and Lando hadn’t envied him, except maybe a little.  _They’re...funny about credits, they don’t like to think about what life costs. She doesn’t like to think about it._ )

“Leia,” Lando says, feeling very old. “That’s....he’s my holdson. I’m happy to have him. He’s always welcome here, you all are. You know that.”

Even through the wavering blue veil of a comm transmission, Leia looks dubious. (Her son is—perhaps it’s cruel to think it, but her son is not welcome in many places. They both know that.) Lando grins, and then tries softening it to a smile. Something gentler, sincere. 

“Really. Let him stay for a few weeks, hide out with his other uncle and review contracts and itemized shipping lists until his eyes bleed. He’ll demandto go back to being a Jedi, I swear.”

Once, long ago, Lando had met the previous Senator Organa—by accident, mostly. He and Han had been smuggling tech to Alderaan, and the Late Senator Organa had been on his way off-world. Lando couldn’t remember why. But the Late Senator had stopped and talked with them for a moment, asked what they were transporting, and where they were from. Lando had been twenty-seven and mostly hopelessly infatuated; he remembers a lot of awkward, stuttering pauses as he tried to think of something impressive to say to the beautiful man in grey-and-purple robes.

(Han had noticed, and he’d fucked Lando into the co-pilot’s seat afterwards, hot with jealousy. Lando had been delighted.)

Lando knows Leia is not the Late Senator Organa’s biological child. Nevertheless, there’s something about her eyes, it registers as the same sort of sinuous pressure on his skin.

“All right,” Leia says at last, as though she’s grinding out transparisteel. “I won’t interfere.”

He laughs. “Princess, you were spying on the Imperial Senate when you were his age. Maybe he’s just restless, looking for his purpose.”

She shoots him a sour look. “He has a purpose.”

“I know,” Lando says. It doesn’t surprise him that Leia got a blindspot there, can’t see the difference between  _a_ purpose and  _your_ purpose. He doubts anyone ever asked her if she wanted to be Princess of the Rebellion. “I know. But let him...I mean, he’s fifteen. Let him have some room to run.”

They talk for a little longer, back and forth—she complains about the glacial pace of the Senate, he throws in some anecdotes about the dysfunctional Cloud City Board of Trustees that have her crying with laughter. By the end, she’s smiling again, and when Lando says, “Let him stay,” she ducks her head and says, “Yes.”

Ben’s door is still open when Lando goes by. The kid is a dark shape in a room of darkened shapes, and Lando looks at that strange and familiar outline for a minute, thinking about Han, and Leia, and Tatooine and Luke wearing black. How oddly contented he is, watching Ben  ~~Organa~~  Solo’s chest rise and fall.

Lando falls into to his own bed, after, and doesn’t dream.

 

* * *

 

Lando will forever treasure the look on Ben Solo’s face when he sets the stack of datapads down in front of him. “ _What_?” Ben says, and Lando grins, his best grin, the kind he typically saves for investors, foremen, and pleasure cruisers who really just get off on watching people grovel.

“You’re a temporary citizen of Cloud City now. Technically, that means you work for Cloud Securities Limited Incorporated, which means you’re not allowed to remain planetside for longer than twenty-four hours without the approval of a Cloud City Securities Limited Incorporated supervisor.” Lando leans in, until he’s close enough that Ben’s eyes have gone wide and panicked, and the kid’s leaning back dangerously in his chair. “I’m you’re supervisor, Ben.”

Lando will give him this: Ben Solo is  _quieter_ than Ben Organa ever was.

(They have lunch together afterwards. Lando takes him to the canteen as a kind of test, but Ben Solo accepts the hydrated meal pack with a minimum of fuss, says thank you, and keeps his head down in the mess hall. With his hair cut, Lando can watch his eyes, and Ben’s are wounded, but not hard. It’s enough. Lando decides it’s enough.)

This goes on, pretty much. Ben Solo has a head for numbers—”Your dad was good at math too,” Lando says, and Ben’s ears go an ugly crimson color—and he’s not bad company if you don’t mind pointed, angry silences. Awkward as all hells, yes, absolutely. Every time a pretty girl even just walks past them he goes silent and panicky, then sulks for hours afterwards; but Han was always like that too, Lando remembers. Too much, too soon, showing all your cards. (Leia had had more dignity, refusing to reveal how far she’d fallen until there might not be another chance.)

“Aren’t you going to ask me what we argued about?” Ben asks during the third week. Lando’s genuinely surprised he managed to hold out.

“You can tell me, if you want,” Lando says, keeping his expression something bored, blank. “But I figure it’s not really my business.”

Ben has to slouch to fit in Lando’s shadow. The realization makes Lando feel pathetically tender towards him, this boy with hands like plates and feet like skimmers and a perpetual scowl. Sometimes, Lando looks at Ben Solo and it’s all he can do not to remember Han, Han at not much older than Ben is now, and he thinks—

It’s not important.

 

* * *

 

The story Lando heard goes like this:

Ben was nine, all scabby knees and cute, probably. (Han wouldn’t shut up about his son being a handsome devil, but Lando’s seen holos of Ben when he was younger—‘interesting-looking’ is being generous.) Anyway, he was a kid. He got in trouble sometimes, like kids do. Especially when they’re Han Solo and Leia Organa’s kid.

But one day, the school commed Leia, and said,  _come immediately._

Ben was sitting outside the head teacher’s office, pale and shaking and babbling about an accident, a mistake, he was sorry. He was so sorry. And Ben reached for his mother with blood all down the front of his shirt, on his arms, and dried like black paint on his hands. 

It wasn’t his blood.

Ben was nine, and Lando doesn’t know what Leia promised the parents of the little girl he almost-killed but it must have been something else, because nothing about the incident ever hit the holonews. This next part of the story gets elided, or maybe Lando’s just not remembering it all. He guesses Leia commed Luke and talked with him about the fact that her son was beyond meditation and floating rocks now; that her son needed help.

Han wasn’t commed until afterwards. (Lando knows because he and Leia fought about that, the first of the last; Han hid out with Lando in the wake of it.  _I’m his dad,_ Han had said after too much whiskey, and Lando’s blood had run cold. Han’s voice had never been that hollow and hopeless. He’d looked...so much older in that moment, an old man already.

 _I’m his dad, and I can’t even—I can’t protect him. I can’t help him. What’s the point of a father who can’t help his son?_ )

One month later, Luke arrived to take Ben to the Outer Rim and teach him how to be a Jedi. And that was that.

 

* * *

 

Ben can be coaxed into talking about Jedi stuff, at least in the theoretical. Lando will admit it’s all a bit beyond him, and boring as all hells, but it’s nice to see the kid get excited about something. Even if it’s just knowing shit Lando doesn’t.

He never talks about Luke or the other students at the school unless Lando asks directly. Even then, his answers are clipped, monosyllabic if he can manage it. The angry poison has faded from his voice, but underneath is a well of something uglier, a hardened sort of bitterness that Lando wouldn’t begin to know how to chip away at.

There were gamblers on Canto Bight who talked like that—old men, spice-addled and ranting, convinced the system had cheated them. Those imagined fortunes curdled their insides, turned them into something monstrous. What a man felt he was owed...

Lando decides it’s none of his business, and stops asking.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes—not often, but maybe out of the corner of Lando’s eye—Ben doesn’t look like Han at all.

 

* * *

 

The dining room where Darth Vader once used Lando to bait his trap was torn out on Lando’s orders, remodeled into a solarium. Folirian snowdrops and new, green hyranith trees grow there now, rising up from neat beds. One of the foremen leads exercises there in the morning and Lando knows that it’s a popular place for the younger workers to go after curfew—the cleaning droids keep complaining about empty bottles, and  _fluids_.

There’s nothing to mark the place as anything more than that.

(”Did you save Cloud City from Darth Vader?” Ben asks, and it takes Lando fifteen minutes of cajoling to figure out that the stupid accounting interns have been gossiping with the Baron’s new assistant.

“I don’t like to talk about it,” Lando says sharply enough that he sees Ben flinch from him. “That was a dark time, we did what we had to do.”)

Once, late into the fourth shift, Lando is making his way from the office block to his rooms and—it’s out of the corner of his eye, he doesn’t know why he looks but he does. There’s a tall humanoid standing in the center of the solarium, swathed in shadows and starlight and Lando’s  _heart_ , it stops dead, everything stops dead,  _he_ stops dead, staring at—at what—

Luke said he saw ghosts. Luke said—

Lando must drop his datapad, because the shadowy figure startles at the crunch of the casing. A moment later, Ben emerges from the solarium, barefoot, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and shadows beneath his eyes.

He’s just a boy and yet Lando is frozen, watching him move like a thing apart from the galaxy as it is—still somehow cloaked in shadow-blue, dangerous. Ben frowns, reaching out and taking Lando’s arm. His hand is hot, through the silk of Lando’s shirt.

“Lando?” Ben says. There’s rare concern on his face, but Lando only makes a choked-off noise, jerking his arm out of Ben’s grip like it burns. (Maybe it does.)

“Uncle Lando?” Ben repeats, and it’s that. Lando is—uncle. This is his holdson, his nephew, his. It’s fine. They’re all fine.

“I’m—I’m fine. It’s...it’s fine.” Lando forces himself to exhale, to bend down and pick up the cracked datapad and smile, weakly. “What are you doing in the iota east sector this late anyway? Come on, let’s...go back.”

Ben walks a step or two ahead of Lando, the tail of the blanket trailing behind him like a cloak. Lando swallows a rising tide of nausea and shuts his eyes, walks the rest of the way blind. Listening to the sound of Ben’s bare feet on the stone, and taking comfort in its humanness.

 

* * *

 

“Kid’s too pale to be yours,” Umlale says, and Lando doesn’t have to turn his head to know she’s smirking. He rolls his eyes, though he knows she won’t be able to see it through the thick protective goggles.

It’s easy to track Ben through the maze of the processing plant, taller than any of the other techs, the bright green trainee helmet bobbing amid the flow of grey-blue. He’d given Lando the blackest, nastiest look when Lando announced he was being reassigned. Lando had definitely  _not_  enjoyed that more than he should have.

“Son of some friends from the war.”

“Must not be very good friends,” Umlale says, and Lando does turn to look at her then. Her luminous eyes wink out from behind the goggles, yellow-green and still uncanny, even after fifteen years of being head of plant operations. Lando always thinks he should be used to it by now; he never actually is.

“What do you mean? He’s my holdson, the kid’s basically family.”

“And you couldn’t get him some swank job in the upper levels?” Umlale asks, her long antennae flicking forward. “Holdson of the Baron, you’d think you could have him making rounds in the casino or overseeing the resorts, working on...outreach, or whatever slick word you’ve come up with to sell the City as more than just a mining colony.”

Lando tries to imagine Ben outreaching to anyone, about anything.

(He pictures...fire. A lot of fire. And people screaming.)

He plays it off with a smirk. “Are you saying that plant tech maintenance isn’t solid work?”

Umlale’s eyes blink, and her whole thorax twitches, in the way Lando knows is as good as a shrug. “It’s solid work. But it’s dirty, and hard. Not the kind of work a Baron gives to family.”

“Unless,” she added after a moment, “you don’t like your family very much.”

“The boy could stand to get his hands dirty,” Lando says, but Umlale is still watching him with bright eyes. Lando flashes a thin smile, turns away. Ben’s green helmet is nowhere to be seen; he must have moved on with the others, into another sector of the plant.

“His pheromones are strange, I noticed when you introduced him. Like something dead and rotting. I know humans aren’t very good at detecting chemical trails, but I wonder...is that what scares you so much?” Umlale asks, and Lando—

—isn’t quick enough to hide it. 

“Oh,” Umlale says, and Lando isn’t sure if it’s his face or his pheromones that give it away. Umlale’s spent enough time scenting chemicals and working with humans, it could be either. “You didn’t know. You thought you distrusted him for no reason?”

Lando opens his mouth, and absolutely does not say,  _no, I thought I was just terrified that he’d raise his hand up like Darth Vader and wipe out half my city, and there would be nothing I could do to stop him._

“Just make sure he doesn’t accidentally burn the place down, all right?” Lando says instead. “He’s my only holdson, but this is my city. I’d hate to have to choose between the two.”

 

* * *

 

Lando can hear Ben crying at night sometimes, thrashing in nightmares Lando has stopped trying to wake him from. Lando lies awake those nights, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what in all the hells he’s supposed to do, _how_ —

“I liked him,” Ben says one morning, of the handsome investor who has stopped coming over because he can’t stand the howling cries of Lando’s holdson.

“ _Did_  you,” Lando snaps. He promised himself he would not get angry at Ben, he would understand, he would  _understand_  because he’d slept with Luke Skywalker a few times, back when Luke was young and less in control. Lando can remember the gold-touch of Luke against his mind, the fundamental strangeness of all that alien power pushing through to his skin. And that was just sometimes—he imagines it’s worse, weirder, having that crazy-making thing in your head all the time. Since before you were born. 

( _Like something dead and rotting_ , Umlale had said.)

He has sympathy for the uncanny strength collected in Ben’s hands. It isn’t irritation. It isn’t.

But Ben only flinches and then stares down at his hands for the rest of the meal. Lando isn’t sure what’s in that look. It exists. It probably shouldn’t. That’s all.

 

* * *

 

“It’s been almost three standard months,” Luke says. He’s pacing, and the holoimage keeps flicking in and out of focus trying to track him. It’s making Lando’s headache worse.

“It’s only been eight weeks,” Lando says, shutting his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to get the headache to ease a little. “Anyway, I don’t know what to tell you. He’s a pretty decent plant maintenance tech now, though. Give him another month, I think he may even be eligible for level two clearance.”

“ _Lando_ ,” Luke sighs, and Lando wants to laugh at how similar they sound—Ben and Luke, that same tone of disapproval from on high. Maybe it’s Force thing.

“You said he’d be begging to come back! You told Leia!” Luke says, and it’s Lando’s turn to sigh.

“I guess I was wrong.”

“He belongs—”

“I’m not going to force him to leave, Luke. He’s an employee of Cloud City, I can’t fire him without cause, and his residency permit only expires upon his death, criminal conviction, voluntary departure, or termination by the City.”

Luke makes a derisive noise, and Lando cracks open an eye, grinning ruefully. “Sorry, Master Jedi. Some of us have to abide by the bylaws.”

Luke is quiet for a long moment. When Lando opens his eyes, Luke is staring off somewhere into the middle distance, looking—grave, maybe. A little sad. “This is his home,” Luke says finally. His voice is quiet. “This is where he’s safe.”

Lando is silent.

He coaxes Ben to talking to Luke himself, after Lando’s done. He gets a shattered comm box for his trouble, the cracked holoprojector throwing out alarming sparks.

“You can take it out of my pay,” Ben snarls as he stalks out of the room, and the air in his wake Lando can taste electricity, like a stormfront moving in.

 

* * *

 

Most nights, Lando teaches Ben to cheat at sabacc. “Han didn’t do the honors?” Lando asks, shuffling the deck. Ben shrugs.

“He didn’t want to pass on—that sort of thing.”

For someone who’d always loved the weightless speed of hyperspace, Han carts a lot of shame around. “Well, I was always a better cardsharp than he was anyway. The trick,” Lando says, flicking a card from one hand to the other and back again, “is not to be too flashy, trust your instincts, and never get caught.”

Lando takes him to the Cloud City casino, once he deems Ben acceptable. He makes Ben give all his winnings back afterwards, “Since technically, when you beat the house, it’s me you’re stealing from.”

“Thanks,” Ben mumbles, late one night when he’s sprawled out on the couch and already mostly asleep. Lando is just shuffling the deck back and forth between his hands, thinking about storm season, and whether they’ll make their numbers for the quarter. 

In the dimmed light, his expression smoothed out and hair falling in his eyes, the kid looks much younger—like a boy this way, a child.

“No problem,” Lando says quietly. “Anyway, I imagine using the Force makes this sort of thing easy for you.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. His eyes are shut, he has long lashes. “But it’s nice.”

 

* * *

 

Lando’s finalizing the new durasteel supplier contract—it’s been in the works for over a year and he wants it  _done;_  they have some major structural repairs to complete before storm season—which is maybe why he doesn’t notice. He’s distracted, running on a haze of caf and uneasy sleep; it makes sense that the rest of the baronetcy staff are also drawn and quiet, focused on pushing through the deal.

It’s a pity when Eroll quits abruptly, claiming a sick mother on Mygeeto, but Lando understands. And it’s a shame that Onrtia decides to use her vacation time just then, given that she’s one of Lando’s best assessors, but she couldn’t be persuaded to wait until the deal closed. Fedyn asks to be reassigned to a lower level, and so does Geem, but Lando always privately thought they didn’t have what it took to work in the baronetcy. 

He doesn’t think anything of any of it until he wishes one of the accounting interns a mild good morning, and she promptly bursts into tears. A meddroid has to be called to sedate her.

(The durasteel supplier contract is put on hold.)

“I had an interesting conversation this morning with Saytini Raum, in the accounting offices,” Lando says to Ben that night at dinner. They’re in Lando’s suites, alone; Lando didn’t want to risk this conversation in the mess hall. He’s still not sure he wants to risk it at all, but all he can think about is Fedyn’s haunted expression, the panic in Onrtia’s voice as she insisted, no, everything was fine, why wouldn’t everything be fine?

Saytini, dosed with sed and her eyes still wide, terrified, saying,  _I can feel him in my head, moving around. Like maggots_.

“What did you talk about?” Ben asks nonchalantly. Or what Lando imagines is supposed to be nonchalantly, the kid has a face like a pane of transparisteel, every emotion reflected there. 

For a moment, Lando allows himself hate him, Ben Organa or Solo or whoever he wants to be right now, clumsily affecting innocence. For that moment, Lando hates him with all the fire of Bespin’s burning core.

Then he exhales, and lets it slide away. It’s replaced by a vast weariness. “Why did you do it, Ben?”

Ben smiles. He actually  _smiles_ , and Lando wants to be sick. He sets down his silverware with a clatter, but the smile on Ben’s face doesn’t falter. “I wanted to help,” Ben says proudly, and Lando shakes his head, uncomprehending. Ben just smiles. “To repay you for everything you’ve given me.”

“A—what?”

“I wanted to help you, help Cloud City. Eroll was talking about you behind your back, complaining about your leadership, so I convinced him to leave and go home. Onrtia isn’t loyal to you, she just wants to make money before she goes, so I made sure she wouldn’t get commission for the supplier contract. You don’t like Fedyn and Geem, they were the previous Baron’s staff, so I convinced them to get reassigned. Saytini was just...I needed information, and she’s a gossip, she knows about stuff.”

“You...convinced them?”

“With the Force, Luke calls it a mind-trick. I even convinced the other workers at the plant to put in more hours, work harder, without asking for any more pay.”

Ben is still smiling, like he’s expecting praise, a pat on the head. Lando dizzily remembers that he  _had_  noticed the uptick in safety incidents at the plant; he’d put it down to a learning curve with the new tech, or maybe the weather—everyone tended to get restless and careless during calms. He’d told the safety director to keep an eye on it and determine if it was a trend, then report back.

Of course it’s a trend. His people—his techs, his miners, his processors and ops staff—have been working until they’re too tired not to hurt themselves.

Lando really will be sick.

“Will it fade?” he asks, keeping his voice as light and neutral as he can.

“Fade?”

“What you—convinced them to do, will that fade on its own or do you have to give them new, different orders?”

“I mean, I guess it fades on its own if I’m not around, but I don’t understand, why would you want it to fade? Everything’s going so well! Your profits are up, you’re producing more and purer tibanna than before!”

Lando runs a hand down his face, trying to...put words in some order that he'll understand, that isn't just screaming in horror. “Ben, you can’t do that, you can’t...”

“I didn’t make them do anything they didn’t want to, it wasn’t even  _for_  me. I was helping!”

The worst part is that Ben looks...genuinely confused, hurt and overeager and it’s too much, it’s all too much. ( _I can feel him in my head, moving around. Like maggots. Like something dead and rotting._ )Lando told Umlale that he would hate to choose between his holdson and his city, but he’s made this choice before. Han or Ben, Darth Vader or no—

It’s the City, every time.

Lando squeezes his eyes shut and braces his hands against the table. The wood is cool against his skin. “Mr. Solo. As of now, your employment with Cloud Securities Limited Incorporated is terminated. Your temporary residency permit will expire twenty-four hours from the processing of termination. You therefore have twenty-four hours to leave the City, or—”

Ben shoots to his feet, knocking his chair to the ground with a crash. “You can’t do that! You promised I wouldn't have to leave! I’m  _helping_!”

“This was wrong, Ben. You...you’ve made yourself a threat to Cloud City and my people,” Lando says, staying seated. He’s not as tall as Ben, but he’s broader, and he suspects he can throw a better punch if Ben gets close enough for it. If Ben decides to use the Force, though—

Ben is breathing shallowly, and all the blood has gone to his cheeks, two spots of blotchy red stark against his paleness. “I’ll stop,” he says wildly. “I’ll stop, I won’t...don’t make me go. I’m sorry. Please, Lando, please, don’t make me—”

Ben doesn’t cry, at least not like Saytini had—he’s white-lipped and gritting his teeth through it, as though outraged that he can’t stop himself. “I was helping,” he says again. "You just don’t want me here, like—everyone else, you’re just like the others, you just—”

Lando sits there and lets him rage, doesn’t even flinch when an invisible strength picks up his plate and hurls it to the wall, smashing it in a thousand pieces. Lando watches his dinner slide, forlornly down the wall; Ben is still yelling. Lando isn’t paying much attention to the words, just the—sound, the boy hurting and lashing out. (When he shuts his eyes Geem is there, trying to smile and failing, just looking twitchy and anxious and uncertain.)

It takes him almost an hour for Ben to wind down again, at which point most everything in Lando’s dining room has been tossed or hurled or smashed. 

Ben sinks back into his chair breathing hard, blotchy-red from his neck to his ears.

“I’m sorry, Ben,” Lando says quietly. “I really am, kid. And of course we’ll get you passage to Endor, I’ll take care of it—”

“I hate you,” Ben says with that same ugly, hardened bitterness. “I hate you more than any of them.”

Lando swallows the protest. “You’re still—family, my holdson.”

Ben huffs, his mouth curving into a sneer, and staggers to his feet again. “ _Family,_ ” he says with that familiar ugly, hardened bitterness. “Sure.”

Lando watches him go and then exhales, puts his forehead down on the table. The woodgrain is cool, and comforting. He shuts his eyes, and simply breathes.

 

* * *

 

“What did you and Leia fight about?” Lando asks, as they’re standing on the wharf, waiting for Ben’s ship to board. It’s a cold, clear morning, and the sun is brilliant white over the clouds.

Ben doesn’t look at him. “I thought it wasn’t any of your business.”

Lando hums, squinting into the light. “Maybe it should have been.”

The freighter captain calls for boarding, and Ben hefts his pack on his shoulder. He looks at Lando for a moment, then swallows and turns away. Lando watches him go, and says nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted at [notbecauseofvictories](http://notbecauseofvictories.tumblr.com/post/171134552115/its-solo-now-ben-offers-it-up-before-lando).


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